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It’s the week after what Jo & I can only describe as the worst weekend ever and we’re now adapting to living in a world without our beloved Maurice.

Maurice back in June 2014

In the end, his passing was incredibly peaceful. At the vet practise we always took him to, we were lucky to have got one of the older vets – a lovely lady-vet called Kay – to help him on his journey over the rainbow bridge and she did so with a great amount of compassion and love.

It felt deeply odd leaving the vets with an empty pet carrier. We drove back home in a daze, feeling oddly misplaced and disconnected from reality. When we got through the front door of the house, it became immediately apparent that the place felt very strange indeed. Although we were both within its walls, the house felt like its very soul had been removed. Maurice was always such a seemingly-perennial presence in the house that the sudden lack of him being in it was – and still is – difficult to deal with. It was always the case that if you made your way into the kitchen, he would silently appear like a little furry ninja and would follow you around the place like an ever-present shadow, would boop his head against your shins and twirl around your feet in his constant quest for noms – or he’d sit down and stare at you, breaking your will to resist with those gorgeous eyes of his and cheeky chatter.

Our fallibly human minds are so familiar to Maurice’s presence that we’ve been reduced to tears on more than one occasion over the past few days because we keep expecting him to appear – which is possibly an attempt at wilful deception by our minds to try and convince ourselves that he’s not gone. There was and is the imagined movement seen in the corner of an eye; a tail vanishing around a corner or a vision of his feline form slinking up the hallway. Items settling in cupboards, the noises and creaks of the house heating up and cooling down could be him in his litter tray or pottering around in the hallway. Phantom memories dancing in the ether of the mind.

While the lack of his presence is raw and like an open wound at the moment, we are able to temper it with the thought and justification that we did the right thing, even though it was was so difficult to go through with it. Like I said in my previous post, we had watched him gradually get worse for the last few weeks, but a strange thing occurred on Sunday where we started to feel guilty. We began wondering if we should have perhaps had him put to sleep weeks ago, ending his suffering sooner when he was a bit more capable, but I’m of the opinion that it would be pointless for us to beat ourselves up over this. There’s was definitely an element of us not wanting to let him go, which ultimately boils down to the simple fact that we loved him so much.